The Gift Of Wanting To Impress

We all want to impress others. Is it so bad?

I’ve always had more male friends than female friends. I’ve had friends who were girls then became boys. I’ve had many boys in my band. I’ve been surrounded mostly by boys all my life. I have some of the most amazing girlfriends in the world however and they are the ones who know me best.

But I knew the music industry was a boys club from the start and I knew I wanted to impress them. The older guys. The ones with the cool music taste, the technological knowledge, the chops and the opportunities. I wanted to show them I was just as good. Maybe I was better. I wanted to learn all their cool shit and be just like them.

We always hear about competitive streaks as being what somewhat negative. And I understand how it can be very destructive on our minds when we are always viewing ourselves through the lens of contrast. Asking, what am I like “in relation” to them? 

In one way this is a very rational way of looking at the world. Think about it, we know hot because we know cold. Everything exists in polarity with something else. Life is a spectrum and every living thing is somewhere on that spectrum between two extremes. We identify ourselves through our differentiation to something else.

We don’t start this way though. It seems we are born with somewhat of a perfect attunement to our Mother. We do not yet know we are not one and the same. Because at this point, we are one with her. At least we lived inside her for a very long time. How fucking psychedelic is that? We once lived inside a warm uterus inside another human being. The womb. Our home.

Then suddenly we look up, light is pouring into our pupils and there’s a huge face in ours, baring teeth, weird white things that look a bit like rectangle fingernails coming out of what looks like a muscle which the humans call gums.

With a blood-curdling (and probably blood hurdling) scream, we cry:

WHERE THE HELL AM I RIGHT NOW?

And so it begins, the annihilation of our perfect attunement. The first dramatic and heartbreaking trauma.

We experience ourselves as a separate being.

How do we come to know that? We compare our hand and our mothers hand and we realize they are two separate things. With air moving between them. We compare ourselves. We identify ourselves. 

And later in life, a competitive streak emerges. We seek to be better than our parents.

Is that so wrong? Of course not. We seek to differentiate from our parents. Wear different clothes. Do the things they tell us not to do. This is perfectly normal, evolutionarily functional and quite a sensible idea. We come to know ourselves through what we are not. Over the course of time, our emphasis moves away from who we are not, what we don’t like and who we don’t like etc toward (hopefully anyway) who we in fact are. What we do like. Who we do like. This is what Jesus calls the Transfiguration. Buddha called this the Enlightenment. In fact perfect oneness is perhaps when we die to the self to find the self. Beautifully put.

So all of this to say: if you’re beating yourself up for envying your friends a little for suddenly slaying the hell out of their new business or career move, you are normal and this is okay.

Let’s just reframe it! What if we could embrace the differentiation between yourself and your friend? For example, let’s call this friend Annie-Sue. 

What if you absolutely let yourself compare your life to hers? Heck, write it down! How am I similar to Annie Sue? How am I different to Annie Sue? How would I like to be more like Annie Sue while realizing I am NOT Annie Sue and I cannot BE Annie Sue. Quite frankly I don’t WANT to be Annie Sue, I want to be me while also acknowledging that there are many things about Annie Sue’s life that I would like to emulate.

Listen, emulation is how we learn. All great artists start by copying and identifying what they like about another artists worldview, and then they try it on. As time goes by, that artists’ practice will begin to develop and differentiate. Aha! Now you have an original worldview! A signature sound! A brushstroke all of your own! How beautiful. 

by David Chang

Make your friends your muse! Not your enemy! Not someone you seek to push down in efforts to aid your own rise. That’s not being competitive, that’s being cruel and envious. Healthy competition on the other hand is being challenged by those on the same path.

I try to impress the hell out my band when I play music with them. I am chuffed when they say I sung well. I get a kick out of knowing I inspired them and maybe even pushed them to be better musicians through what I ask of them during my show. Sometimes I’l pull out songs we haven’t played in months. Am I testing them a bit? Maybe. But I do this to keep them on their toes, to keep me on my toes, to let my band know I trust them so implicitly to lean on their instincts and trust in their years of practice, musicality and intuition. I know they’ll nail it and they do. Do they sometimes make mistakes? Yes, just as I do when I try something new on stage. But thats not what matters. What matters is harnessing spontaneity and pushing one another to be BETTER. 

What if you’ve already got everything you need to be absolutely everything you’re intended to be? What if it’s not a matter of possession, but a matter of activation? You cannot know what is within you until it is illuminated.

Many say “don’t look outside of you for what is within….”

Yes, but my friends. We are G-o-d to one another.

It takes me time to write out G-o-d when I write it this way. I have to think about it. Pause to put dashes between the letters... I have to reflect on the weight of this word. A word that has saved lives and destroyed them. We ought to slow down and think about that word before writing it. People apologize around me sometimes for saying “Jesus!” or “Oh My God!” I always say, why would that be offensive? If these words are personally imbued with Love for me, wouldn’t I strive to say them all the time? Is that really in vain?

I also think saying “Goddamn” is a very cathartic thing to say at times and if you’ve ever read the book of Job you will be familiar with humans in the biblical canon criticizing God, swearing at God, cursing their very lives out of frustration, anger, confusion and outright hatred for the woes of their people. If your God gets offended by that, you might need a bigger God.

I say G-o-d a lot but I probably have an idea of G-o-d that is so completely unique to me that there will never be an adequate word to capture that. This the great mystery and wonder of the human experience. We each have a different lens! Imagine if we all thought and looked the same! Yuck! 

So, here at my Substack we will, at times, spell out that word when we talk about G-o-d. We will admit that we are all looking at a different side of this thing. Some of you will affirm the capitalized ‘G’. Some won’t. Some of you will gaze at the ‘O’ with more curiousity than the ‘G”. And then there’s those of you looking at the ‘D. You know who you are.

I compare myself to others often. And it is not always helpful, supportive, friendly or fun. All good things in life have the potential for exploitation and can distort to very negative ends. I do think contrast can be our friend though. I want to compete in a way that lifts up myself and others. Because guess what?
There’s room for all of us.

Does the sky quietly escort a star out when it gets too full in space?

Or, in the words of Ben Gibbard, will Heaven illuminate the ‘no’s on its vacancy signs ?

There’s space for us all and if you’re trying to impress someone it probably means you respect them and want them to accept you which is extremely human and vulnerable and admirable.

We want to belong to a tribe that will push us to be the best version of ourselves. Sometimes we will leave the tribe and that may be absolutely necessary too. At a certain point, we may recognize that our hometown has grown too small for our dreams and our friend group is stuck gossiping about Annie Sue when we have Goddamn work to do!

That’s all for now.

Love